Economics and Usage of Digital Library Collections: Feature Article

PEAK 2000 Conference Brings Librarians, Publishers, Economists Together

-- by Brian Rosenblum, University Library

(March 24, 2000) Leaders from the library, publishing, and economics communities gathered at the University of Michigan on March 23-24 to share recent research on the economics and usage of digital publications.

PEAK 2000: Economics and Usage of Digital Library Collections, a conference jointly sponsored by the Program for Research on the Information Economy (PRIE) and the University Library and its Digital Library Program, was held in the School of Information. The conference grew out of the recognition that digital technology has transformed the way in which libraries and scholarly publishers conduct business and provide service.

Conference presenters included representatives from universities throughout the United States and Europe, publishers, corporate libraries, and nonprofit organizations. Nearly 100 registered participants, plus numerous others, attended the sessions during the course of the two days as the conference focused on a number of issues, including pricing models, cost studies, and usage studies.

"In the past few years, there have been predictions about the future of scholarly communication in a digital age," says Wendy Lougee, associate university library director for digital library initiatives. "Some expect new patterns of usage and communications to change the function or even the role of the refereed journal. Most agree that the price models for traditional publishing cannot hold in the digital arena. Some predict the disappearance of for-profit publishers, but others see a trend toward growth and increased market power of publishers."

Indeed, the conference gave evidence of both trends. Mark McCabe of Georgia Tech University and formerly with the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, argued that publishers are finding it profitable to increase the size of their journal portfolios through mergers, and that some of these mergers have resulted in substantially increased market power. At the same time, there was evidence of new nonprofit and information-sharing initiatives, such as RePEc, one of the largest sources of freely downloadable scientific papers in the world, and a grass-roots campaign to persuade economics scholars not to referee any journals that have too high a subscription price.

New price models were examined by a number of the participants. Professor Jeff MacKie-Mason of the School of Information, founding director of PRIE, and Lougee discussed Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge (PEAK), a three-year project that gave University and research facilities a choice of several pricing options for access to 1,200 Elsevier Science journals.

Leah Halliday of the Department of Information Science at the University of Loughborough described her United Kingdom-based research that examined other models, including one in which journal content was provided free while costs were paid by the authors published in the journal. Another model was one in which commercial market forces were applied to all aspects of the publishing process, including the editing and refereeing of journals, which is often done for free in the scholarly world.

Carol Montgomery and JoAnne Sparks of Drexel University provided a detailed report of how their electronic journal collection has affected costs and staff needs. Costs for activities like circulation, reshelving, and binding have decreased, while costs for systems maintenance, license negotiation, printing, and reference services have increased.

It became apparent from this and other presentations that digital projects, especially those involving the conversion of materials to digital formats, can be quite expensive to implement and provide. As MacKie-Mason noted, it is important to remember that "the digital revolution is not a cost-saving revolution." Rather, he added, it is value-adding.

Evidence of value-adding was provided by some of the usage study presentations which showed the use of digital resources growing very fast and exceeding even the most optimistic predictions, while the use of print-based materials, rather than dropping, has remained steady. The University of Louisville has seen use of its electronic journals increase four-fold over the last three years, while JSTOR, a provider of electronic versions of past journal volumes, has seen even faster growth. Other studies indicate that while use is high, even small obstacles to use (a request for a password or simply having to move through too many computer screens) had a large effect on use, something libraries and publishers will undoubtedly take into consideration in the future.

The corporate library perspective was also represented, with their particular dependence on budget fluctuations based on corporate profits, and users who are increasingly demanding material delivered immediately to their desktop.

It is clear that scholarly communication, and the services provided by libraries and publishers, is in the midst of great change. There is much more research to be done, but the PEAK 2000 conference was able to point out trends and important areas for further study and identify the important questions scholars and publishers should be asking. All of this provides a strong framework for further research and analysis of the rich data sets that are becoming increasingly available.

Most of the papers presented at the conference, as well as a complete list of speakers and topics, are available on the conference Web site at www.si.umich.edu/PEAK-2000.